The French flavor

What constitutes the charm of Paris? Which are the elements that have made it the tourist Mecca, the “must-see” capital of the Western world?

It is an ancient city, on a site inhabited continuously for over two thousand years; but other world cities, not only in Europe, have been occupied for even longer periods. Paris is built along and around a river, but this is rather common when you are thinking of establishing habitation. A river provides you with water, and with sanitation, as well as a means of transportation for people and supplies.

Does the attractiveness reside in the charm of its inhabitants? Many visitors complain that Paris would be perfect without the Parisians, of sharp and intemperate wit, and little patience for foreigners. Or in the leisurely pace of daily life? Paris is clogged with traffic and fast-paced crowds, like New York, London or Tokyo.

Yet there is no doubt that Paris is endowed with a distinct atmosphere, that makes its streets immediately recognizable and that has been imitated in many places around the world. The urban environment here is not strictly commercial and “bottom-line”, like New York, where art in the streets is added as an after-thought and a fiscal device. There is a deliberate effort by the people in charge of administering Paris to provide the urban furniture that will make life on the streets more pleasant and add the “flavor” that we so appreciate.

For instance during many years Paris was known for its “vespasiennes”, or “pissotières”, the public conveniences provided for the relief of urgent bodily functions, and so dear to the French novelist Roger Peyrefitte. The distinctive design covered the torso of the gentlemen inside, but left the feet and heads visible to passers-by. They have now been replaced by the automated concrete pill-boxes, flushed and sanitized after each user, that provide the privacy required to make them available to women. Initially they required the insertion of coins, but with the advent of a socialist Mayor, the fee was waived.

The most famous of the urban accoutrements on the streets of Paris are, without doubt, the Métro access stairs designed and built between 1900 and 1913 by the architect Héctor Guimard (1867-1942). Trained at the Êcole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, in the principles and theories of Viollet-Le-Duc, he is one of the European architects who defined the style of Art Nouveau, with Victor Horta in Belgium, the Hoffmann workshops in Vienna as well as, in Barcelona, Gaudí and Puig i Cadafalch.

Some days ago I travelled with a friend of mine to GHM, a foundry east of Paris, in the little village of Sommevoire, where the Guimard entrances to the Métro were cast, and where the moulds are kept. This foundry was established here in 1840, on the site of an older foundry going back to about 1157. The iron ore was available without mining, on the surface, and abundant woods provided the fuel, while a small river assured the water. This conjunction of inputs gave birth in these areas to a profusion of large and small foundries and metallurgical workshops. Pont-a-Mousson with its steelworks lies a bit further east, on the Moselle river.

On the western approaches to the Alsace, this is flat and pleasant countryside, very much “la douce France” (sweet France), worked and reworked by the plow, providing the rich produce that is essential to Frenchness. The small villages cluster around old churches, there always is a bar or an inn, a boulangérie, a monument to the village dead in one or all the wars of the last two centuries. If you step out of the car you will be assailed by the smell of freshly baked bread, of the cattle near by.

Sommevoire is a company town. Most of the population works for the foundry and the jobs are handed on from father to son.

GHM has provided the urban furniture for Paris for more than a hundred years. In addition it owns the moulds to hundreds of figures and monuments designed by its own and other artists. The heyday of the industry came after the First World War, when any village of any relevance needed to put up monuments to its dead in the awful carnage of the Flanders battlefields.



From the GHM workshops also come the charming four caryatid green water fountains found in many Paris streets (one of them flows in the rue Saint Paul, near to my flat), as well as the candelabra on the Pont Alexandre III between the Invalides and the Grand Palais. GHM has provided lamp-posts to cities in the Middle East, and all over the world. On the day of my visit visitors from Morocco were looking at a range of fixtures to be installed on the streets of Rabat and Fés.

Near Sommevoire, on a little hill, lies Brienne-le-Chateau, site of the school where Carlo Buonaparte deposited in 1779 his 10 year old son, Nabulio, to be trained for an army career. Thirty-five years later Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Brienne with an army of 30,000 raw recruits to stop the advance of the Prussian army of the Sixth Coalition on Paris. Although he is reported to have won this battle, he abdicated for the first time on the 30th of March 1814. The school closed long ago, but the old chateau houses a small Napoleonic museum, where you can find, among other things, a hat that Napoleon might have worn.

In France, wherever you go, somebody or something is related to Napoleon.